Capturing the Moment

   As always with UnCruise, our itinerary leaves a lot of room for flexibility and inspiration. The group this week was really into glaciers after their opening day flightseeing trip over LeConte Glacier near Petersburg, AK. So our bold plan was to show them three glaciers on the last three days, all experienced in completely different ways.   Up first was Dawes Glacier. At the end of a beautiful fjord named Endicott Arm, a great tidewater glacier stands guard as it has for thousands of years. It slowly marches its river of ice down and through the mountains until ending in the ocean with a 200ft tall face that often calves great chunks of ice into the water. Here we took advantage of the calm, windless conditions to explore by kayak. We saw calvings, a shooter, and had a visit from a much appreciated cocoa boat serving hot cocoa with kahlua. Kayking through the ice and watching a glacier calve made the guests wonder what could possibly top this.   Next up...

Ice Garden at LeConte Glacier Bay  LeConte Glacier is the southernmost tidewater glacier in the United States. It empties about 12 miles southeast of the fishing town of Petersburg. The fish packing plant at Petersburg gained prominence early on for using the abundant ice breaking off from the nearby glacier to pack the fresh fish and ship it to far off places like San Francisco.   LeConte glacier has receded about 9 miles from its terminal moraine. Now, a very shallow mud bar is all that remains to show how far the glacier once advanced to. This bar is a worry to boats trying to navigate through these waters, but it creates a pretty incredible sight just inside of it. All of these huge icebergs created by the actively calving glacier get grounded on the shallow bar and remain stuck inside the bay until they finally break apart or melt away. It was my goal to anchor safely outside the bar, then use small zodiacs to zip in and among the icebergs. I call this area the LeC...